“Ben Carson’s Fear Of A Muslim President”: Islam Is ‘incompatible With The Constitution’; So Much For Constitutional Conservatism
What a week to be Muslim! Last Monday, 14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for making a homemade clock and bringing to school. But by Tuesday, we saw an outpouring of support for Mohamed on social media and from celebrities like Mark Zuckerberg and even President Obama.
Then on Thursday, Donald Trump refused to counter a supporter spewing vile anti-Muslim crap at a Trump event. But come Saturday, Trump was declaring,
“I love the Muslims. I think they’re great people.”
Trump even said he would “absolutely” be open to appointing a Muslim American to his cabinet or have on his ticket as a running mate. (Good luck finding a Republican Muslim after this week!)
That brings us to Sunday. Ben Carson, currently running second to Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, gave us this gem while on NBC’s Meet the Press: “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”
Why would Carson be adamantly opposed to a Muslim president, you may ask? Because Carson believes that Islam is “incompatible with the Constitution.”
The glaring irony of Carson arguing that a Muslim should not be president simply because of his or her faith is that his position is what’s actually incompatible with the Constitution. Carson is calling for a religious test for the presidency. But that’s expressly banned by Article VI of the Constitution, which provides that “no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.
Our nation’s Founding Fathers could not have made it more clear that Carson’s view that a person’s faith should disqualify him or her for federal office violates the values and principles of our nation.
Carson’s words are truly no different than the anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic rhetoric heard in American politics in the past. For example, during the 1960 race for president, John F. Kennedy was attacked for his Catholicism. As Shaun Casey noted in his book The Making of a Catholic President allegations against Kennedy included that the “Roman Catholic faith was ultimately incompatible with principles” of our nation.
And anti-Semitism was part of the American political landscape in the 1930s. For example, Father Charles Coughlin was a wildly popular radio host who had spewed anti-Semitic diatribes including the idea that Jews weren’t loyal to America. But that didn’t stop American politicians from partnering up with him. In fact Coughlin spoke at the 1932 Democratic National Convention.
So you see, what Carson and other Republicans have said about Muslim holding beliefs inconsistent with American values or not being loyal to America has been said before about Catholics and Jews.
Now the good news for Muslims (and bad for Carson and his ilk) is that a poll from July found that 60 percent of Americans would support a Muslim candidate for president. Maybe Carson is jealous because he will never see that level of support?!
And even more upsetting for Carson is that the poll found 76 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds would support a Muslim, as would 67 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds. That means the future for a Muslim candidate for president is far brighter than Carson’s.
Now Carson’s point that somehow Islam is incompatible with American values is astoundingly wrong. Islam is grounded on Judeo Christian values, which is why all three of these religions are known as the Abrahamic faiths. I guess Carson is clueless that Jesus, Abraham, and Moses are revered by Muslims.
In fact, this Thursday marks one of the most important Islamic holidays known as Eid Al Adha, or the Feast of the Sacrifice. Does this day celebrate something to do with the Prophet Muhammad? Nope, it commemorates the moment when God appeared to the prophet Abraham and asked him to sacrifice his son as an act of devotion. Yep, that’s the same Abraham the Jews like.
Putting all of this side, what’s truly the most alarming about Carson’s words is that he’s feeding the narrative we hear from others on the right that Muslims are threat to America. He’s stoking flames of fear about Muslims that not only leads to hatred, it may bring some to the doorstep of violence. And sadly some have crossed through that threshold. For example, right-winger Glendon Scott Crawford was convicted in April for plotting a terrorist attack to kill Muslim Americans with a weapon of mass destruction and will soon be sentenced to 25 years to life.
And Robert Doggart, a Christian minister, is about to start trial on charges of plotting to slaughter Muslims in upstate New York using M-4 military assault rifles, explosives, and a machete to cut the Muslims “to shreds.”
Carson’s words also contribute to a climate where hate crimes versus Muslims are five times higher today than pre 9/11. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that weekly, I see incidents of everything from threats against Muslim Americans to defacing of Muslim houses of worship to actual physical assaults on Muslims. (I mention these events every week on my SiriusXM radio show in the segment “Islamophobe of the week,” and we are never at a loss to find three or more nominees.)
I have no doubt that Carson will lose this race. But sadly his views will continue on in the GOP until we see a real leader in that party stand up and make it clear that this type of fear mongering against fellow American is no longer acceptable. I just wonder if we will see that day any time soon?
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, September 20, 2015
“Our Constitution Neither Knows Nor Tolerates Classes”: Ben Carson Thinks Islam Isn’t Consistent With The Constitution. He’s Dead Wrong
Dr. Ben Carson excels in addled interpretations of America’s founding principles. In May, the Republican presidential candidate claimed that the president has the power to ignore the Supreme Court’s gay marriage ruling. And last month, when asked by Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd whether the Bible has “authority” over the Constitution, said, “That is not a simple question.” He extended this streak of misinterpretation on Sunday when Todd asked him whether he thought “Islam is consistent with the Constitution.” Carson replied, “No, I don’t, I do not,” and then added, “I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that.”
In fact, Islam is neither consistent nor inconsistent with the Constitution; Islam is irrelevant to any discussion of the Constitution or rules of our governance. The same is true of Catholicism, Judaism, Buddhism, and every Protestant sect—even atheism, as the document does not once mention God. There is no religious test, preference, predilection, or, for that matter, even mention of any particular religion in the document itself and, with the exception of one line in the first amendment, in which “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” no mention of religion is made at all.
At the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, other than an opening prayer, which was non-denominational, and one plea by Benjamin Franklin on June 28 to appoint a chaplain to help break what had descended into an acrimonious logjam—a proposal that was ignored—religion was the last thing the delegates were thinking about. The one instance in which religious preference did arise was after the Convention ended, and John Jay, who had not been present but who would later become the Supreme Court’s first chief justice, wanted to restrict participation in government by Catholics. Jay, descended from Huguenots who had been oppressed by the Catholic majority in France, was quickly persuaded to drop his objections.
The larger issue, however, is the tendency of many Americans these days, both in and out of politics but especially conservatives, to evoke the Constitution without having any idea what it says or does not say. Even worse, they use a document whose sole purpose was to guarantee freedoms to attempt to try to limit the freedoms of those with whom they disagree. The Constitution is imperfect, of course, and in practice has been used to validate some terrible injustices—slavery, the deportation of Japanese-Americans, or speech that some found politically offensive. But past sins in no way means that we should condescend to our worst instincts. The Constitution can also be a tool to create a society where any American can grow up to be president, even a former neurosurgeon who seems to have little respect for its spirit.
Which brings us to Carson’s second assertion on Sunday: that no follower of Islam should sit in the White House. The only possible justification he could have for such a sentiment is the belief that followers of Islam are inherently a security risk, because their first loyalty is to … what? The Islamic State, Saudi Arabia, some radical imam? Deportation of Japanese-Americans during World War II was undertaken for the same reason—that they would somehow be more loyal to the emperor than to the United States. It proved tragically and hideously inaccurate. No one fought with more valor than young Japanese-Americans in Italy whose families had been shunted off to concentration camps.
In the end, the argument is about whether the United States is everyone’s country or just certain people’s country. Dr. Carson once again raises the specter that, despite all evidence and jurisprudence to the contrary, America is a “Christian nation.” Those who take this stance seem to do so only on the basis that most, if not all, of the Founders were Christian, somewhat ironic because overwhelmingly they were, at best, lax in their beliefs. And it is no more accurate to say America is “Christian” because it happens to have a Christian majority than it is to say that America is “white” for the same reason.
“[I]n the view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens,” Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote in his stinging dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). “There is no caste here. Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.” This is also true of religion, as everyone in America—and especially its political leaders—should understand by now. If candidates like Carson can’t be bothered to read and understand the 4,500 words that comprise our founding document, they should not be considered fit for the job that requires they defend it.
By: Lawrence Goldstone, Author of The Activist: John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison and the Myth of Judicial Review and Inherently Unequal; The New Republic, September 20, 2015
“What Used To Seem Impossible No Longer Does”: Donald Trump Could Actually Be The Republican Party’s Nominee For President
Though there are many Republican presidential candidates whose continuing presence in the race seems to defy common sense, last week saw the first withdrawal of the campaign, as former Texas governor Rick Perry decided to pack it in and sashay back to Texas. So we’re now down to a mere 16 GOP candidates, at least 14 of whom are hoping that at some point there will be a sudden and inexplicable surge of interest in the possibility that they might be president. Meanwhile, the two who are actually gaining support, Donald Trump and Ben Carson, are the most wildly implausible in the bunch.
Relish this primary race, my friends, because we may not see its bizarre like again.
The candidates will be debating again on Wednesday, and the RNC’s plan to limit and space out the number of debates seems to be working—if the idea was to heighten anticipation and the possibility that something interesting might occur when you cram all those contenders on stage. But unless you believe that Jeb Bush’s brain trust has come up with a zinger to use against Trump that is so spectacularly clever that it will be a rhetorical rapier driving straight through the heart of the latter’s campaign, I suspect we’re about to enter a new phase in the race.
In the three months since he announced that he was running, the tone of discussion around Trump’s bid has gone from “Isn’t he a crazy character?” to “Sure he’s leading now, but he has zero chance of being the nominee,” to “OK, he’s way ahead, but there are a lot of good reasons why he won’t be the nominee.” And what’s coming next? “Oh my god, Donald Trump could actually be the nominee.”
This is the point where, as a sane observer with a reasonable grasp of presidential campaign history, I’m supposed to say that as entertaining as the Trump candidacy has been, he can’t possibly win his party’s nomination. His support has a natural ceiling, as even in the GOP there could only be so many voters who will fall for his shtick. Unlike more traditional candidates, he won’t be able to put together the endorsements of key politicians and activists who bring with them the apparatus that turns primary voters out to vote. It’s one thing to lead in polls for a while, but it’s quite a different thing to actually get voters to push your button in the booth. Above all, as those of us in the know all know, eventually the act will wear thin and primary voters will turn to one of the more traditionally qualified candidates.
And yet here we are, and Trump is getting more, not less, serious. We keep thinking he’s reached his apex, but his support has only been going up. He now averages polling percentages in the mid-30s, and the only other candidate in double digits is Carson. Even if Trump originally decided to run as half a lark, he’s now most certainly acting like he thinks he can win. It’s only three and a half months before the actual voting starts—a period that will go by extraordinarily quickly, just you watch. Primary voters may well turn away from him for any number of reasons, but it isn’t as though millions of them are going to say, “Wait a minute—I thought Trump was a serious guy, but it turns out he’s just a blowhard! How could I have been fooled!?!” Everybody knows who he is already.
If you’re looking for someone whose candidacy will experience a quick fall, I’d bank on the good doctor, who knows as little about governing as Trump does, but has no particular argument to make to voters about why he should be president other than the fact that he has a compelling personal story. Which is nice as far as it goes (I don’t think anybody’s going to make a TV biopic about Jeb Bush’s inspiring journey from Kennebunkport to Tallahassee), but after voters hear it and say, “What a great guy!” the next part of the equation is extremely hard to come up with.
Trump, on the other hand, has an argument, one that may be even more perfectly suited for the Republican electorate in 2016 than most people realized. After seven years of all-out ideological combat against both Barack Obama and internal apostates, the case so many thought the GOP candidates were going to have to make—about who is the most conservative—turns out to be a secondary consideration. The emotions boiling up in the Republican ranks are dissatisfaction, disgruntlement, even disgust, not just with “Washington” and “government,” but with their own party and its leaders, who are seen as a bunch of ineffectual phonies who can’t get anything done.
So the guy who built a persona on firing people, not to mention on the single-minded pursuit of profit and garish excess, couldn’t have been better positioned to capitalize on the Republican moment. Voters may be deluded if they think that Trump is going to march in to Washington and whip it into shape, right before he builds a 2,000-mile wall on the southern border and forces China to give us back all our jobs. But when he tells them, “We will have so much winning when I get elected that you will get bored with winning,” it sounds like exactly what they’ve been waiting for.
Am I saying that Donald Trump is going to be the Republican nominee after all? I’ll be frank and say I have no idea (which is part of what makes this all so interesting). But what I can say is that it no longer seems as impossible as it did just a few weeks ago. Bizarre, absurd, horrifying? Absolutely. But far from impossible.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, September 13, 2015
“How The ‘Party Of Stupid’ Birthed Trump And Carson”: Leveraging Racism Plus Pandering To The Dumb And Incoherently Angry
At the start of the cycle, conservative soothsayers boasted of the “deep bench” on the right; governors of purple states, with proven records, were the headliners. Worries that a handful of first-term senators in the mix might suggest a lack of seriousness about the real work of governance were brushed off by pointing to Barack Obama as precedent.
Now the party’s rising stars are two men who have exactly as much experience in government as they do interest in making government work. Their fealty to the Republican Party is almost as recent as their decision to run for president. Carson was a registered independent until 2014, and Trump flaunts his pan-ideological predilections to this very day.
Conservatives like to paint liberals as slaves to sentiment. The “bleeding hearts” sobriquet also connotes eyes too misty with tears to see the hard truths: We legislate based on immigrant sob stories and vote for presidential candidates to salve our own guilty consciences. Trump’s politically incorrect shtick is just another way of calling out this supposed divide: “We’re tired of the nice people,” he says, and by saying it creates a truth if it didn’t exist before.
For his part, Carson has been eager to prove his soothing bedside manner is an interface, not a core value. His youthful Democratic sympathies were Kool-Aid-induced; Reagan “reprogram[med]” him: “He sounded like a logical person and my mind changed.”
Since the neocons first uncracked themselves from the Ivy League, the conservative movement has masqueraded as the “think, not feel” wing of American politics. But their courtship of nativists, segregationists, and other grievance-seekers has led to this Trump/Carson moment. Not the party of ideas, but the party of stupid, where even smart, successful people have to pander to the dumb and incoherently angry.
According to CNN, 75 percent of those supporting candidates with no previous electoral experience are attracted to “their views on the issues.” I suspect that respondents selected that answer because they couldn’t just grunt.
Trump’s distaste for policy specifics could fill dozens of white papers that he’d never read. The fact that Carson justified his damning of Obamacare as “worse than 9/11” because the 9/11 attack was “an isolated event” speaks to his ignorance about terrorism as much as it does about the effects of the Affordable Care Act.
Here’s the thing: Trump and Carson are winning a huge slice of the GOP base because of that prideful ignorance, which to voters signifies not just a rejection of the establishment or elites but a release from the hard work of having to think.
Let me be clear: To say Carson and Trump are anti-intellectual doesn’t mean they are dumb. Far from it.
Trump, especially, has shown a genius—a high-level forethought, not some native street smarts—in how he communicates his… oh, let’s call it his “vision.” Carson, too, has crafted his brand to appeal to those tired of ideas and arguing and philosophical debates. Given Carson’s smooth affect, his marketing handiwork is, ironically, a less subtle product than Trump’s; it shows the seams from where Carson has had to forcibly rip out the parts of his intellectual history that evince a deviation from the full-throated anti-establishmentarianism the Republican base now demands. (Forget his much-discussed turnaround on abortion: what about endorsing death panels, affirmative action, and eliminating for-profit insurance companies?)
Both Trump and Carson are brilliant in leveraging their extraordinary professional success as bait to voters whose principal complaint hinges on a nagging sense of failure. Audiences aren’t flocking to these brutalist polymaths for their ideas. Indeed, in a party already thirsty for innovative policy approaches, Trump and Carson stand out for the pride they take in their xeriscape platforms: empty places, where occasional quasi-insights drift by like tumbleweeds, unmoored from experience or data.
Trump’s screechingly casual approach to information is especially appalling. An anecdote in a recent Rolling Stone profile charts the route from Trump’s complete ignorance on the heroin epidemic in the Northeast (“You know New Hampshire has a huge problem with heroin? Why do ya s’pose that is?”), to his query of the reporter for information (“I tell him that it probably has to do with OxyContin and school kids raiding their parents’ medicine chests”), to his airy reference in a speech minutes later: “It starts probably with OxyContin, from what I’m hearing.” The conclusion implies, among other things, that this is a subject he may have discussed more than once.
From the embroidered, hearsay nature of Trump’s answers to concrete questions, I would say he treats facts like gossip—except I’m sure he takes gossip more seriously than facts. Trump knows he is expected to have some command of issues beyond “deals,” and so he clings to one or two more-or-less certain applause lines like a sticky-fingered child. Witness these excruciating exchanges with a slumming Hugh Hewitt, in which Trump dismisses questions about the intricacies of Middle East foreign policy with a koan-like recitation, “The Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated.” He says this even when the question is about Hezbollah, or al-Baghdadi—or, points for trying, the “Quds.”
Such rote memorized factlets have all the substance of cotton candy, and when he stretches them to apply to topics outside his limited scope of knowledge, they tatter and fall apart embarrassingly. Or, what would be embarrassing, if it were not for the fact that Trump has been able to rely on the underlying distrust his supporters have for experts.
Carson is not much better. If Trump’s shameless doubletalk (to evangelical voters, especially) suggests he thinks his supporters are suckers, Carson thinks his are rubes. His compulsory campaign tome is punctuated with what should be hackle-raising condescension, or at least revealingly faulty logic: “If you know all 26 letters of the alphabet, you are on your way to reading.” Perhaps he thought he was writing an audiobook script.
In a saner or at least more deliberative world, Carson’s debate-ending “zinger” about being the only person on stage to have separated Siamese twins would be treated as a howler of a gaffe, along the lines of Admiral Stockdale’s retrospectively winsome admission, “Who am I? Why am I here?” One thing (neurosurgery) has nothing to do with the other (the presidency), and to pretend the skills are transferable is an insult—mostly to neurosurgeons.
Carson has a predictable defense to his nonchalant naiveté: “There’s nobody who knows everything,” after all. He’ll delegate, just like how when he “runs into a kidney problem… will call in a renal specialist!” But he’s giving comfort to the patient by only taking the analogy halfway. The real parallel wouldn’t be a surgeon calling in for help on a single complication, it would be having a really smart diplomat trying to figure out how to run an ER.
There’s a difference between being anti-intellectual and being dumb; there’s also a difference between having a governing philosophy and being smart. Scott Walker, for instance, has a more-or-less coherent approach to governing (do less and less of it). But he appears to be impersonating an honest-to-goodness dumbass, incapable of answering the simplest questions without sinking into the rhetorical version of Zeno’s paradox. He gets halfway to a definitive opinion, then halfway again, forever splitting the distance between himself and, it seems, the nomination.
Walker, like all the other Republican politicians with a résumé that matches the job opening, has been reduced to playing dumb. Is it an accident that the first major candidate to drop out was also the one with the longest gubernatorial résumé?
How did we get here?
You can’t spend 40 years tacitly making racists feel welcome in your party and expect the intellectual atmosphere not to suffer, or for that anti-intellectualism to stay bounded with race.
Not only does the GOP’s history of leveraging racism, if not explicitly endorsing it, explain Trump’s success (as numerous commentators have pointed out), it also explains Carson’s rise—and not just as embedded in the sideways condescension of considering Carson “not like the others.” Carson appeals to the same anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-idea, anti-democratic set of biases the GOP establishment has been cultivating for decades.
Bigotry entered into the conservative movement’s DNA like a virus, altering the intellectual inheritance of the party of Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol. Where once it meant something to declare certain attitudes or policies too ugly or hateful to take seriously, much less include in debate, there is now a movement that can’t afford to call out bald ignorance and gross sexism for fear the most ardent banner-carriers might get offended. They say it’s the left that is governed by political correctness, but the deference paid to the sensitivity of Trump’s followers is as oppressive as any campus trigger warning.
“There is just something about him,” one fan of Carson’s said early on, as if he was “appointed by some higher power to do this.” Anti-democratic sentiments don’t come much more clearly expressed than that.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, September 14, 2015
“Has Dr. Ben Finally Stepped In It?”: “We Don’t Need A Department Of Veterans Affairs”
In my TPMCafe column on Ben Carson earlier this week, I noted that he had been pretty vague on a lot of issues even as he had wrapped his extremist philosophy in dog whistles. That’s quite the successful formula, for a while at least, for a stealth wingnut with a powerful biography and a charming manner.
Could be, though, he’s just stepped in a great big cow patty, per Military Times‘ Leo Shane III:
Presidential hopeful Ben Carson’s comments suggesting the Veterans Affairs Department should be eliminated drew quick condemnation from multiple veterans groups, who called the idea short-sighted and ill-informed.
On a national radio show Thursday, Carson said that the country need to re-examine how it cares for veterans but also how to cut back on government bureaucracy.
“There is a lot of stuff we’re doing that doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “We don’t need a Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans Affairs should be folded in under the Department of Defense.”
Carson said he wants to provide all veterans with health savings accounts to pay for private-sector medical care and reserve defense-run veterans clinics for highly specialized care, like traumatic brain injury treatment and limb replacements.
Ah, yes, the HSA pet rock. But it’s not a welcome idea to the quite conservative VFW:
“To suggest that disabled veterans could be sent out into the economy with a health savings account card overlooks the fact that civilian health care has waiting lists of their own … and presupposes that civilian doctors have the same skill sets as VA doctors, who see veterans of every age and malady every day,” VFW National Commander John Biedrzyck said in a statement.
“(VA) provides an irreplaceable service to the nation’s wounded, ill and injured veterans, and my organization will not let any candidate for any office suggest anything otherwise.”
Them’s fighting words, and other vet groups seem even less pleased:
In a lengthy online essay, Paralyzed Veterans of America Deputy Executive Director Sherman Gillums Jr. called the plan “a misguided notion born from ignorance of what each department does.”
“Those who insist ‘we don’t need a Department of Veterans Affairs’ are likely people who in fact do not need VA care because of good health or cannot access VA care due to ineligibility, as is the case with Dr. Carson,” he wrote.
“However, frustration in reaction to problems in VA combined with ignorance about what VA does and how it works are not the ingredients for a recipe of success where fixing the department is concerned.”
And here’s the thing: this involves the one issue area where Carson can’t say he’s still playing catch-up because he’s been off saving lives for decades. As a physician, health care policy is the one thing he definitely will be expected to “get.”
Politics aside, abolishing the VA health system to shunt veterans (or at least those not picked up by the DoD, which could create another whole set of problems) into the private system is pretty close to the opposite of what we should be doing. As WaMo’s own Phil Longman explained back in 2007, we ought to be making the rest of the health care system more like the VA. No, it’s not perfect; the eligibility system has problems, as well all know; but the actual care it provides at a limited cost remains the best available in the country. And Ben Carson ought to realize that.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, September 4, 2015
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